Sons (51 page)

The base camp at Cu Chi looked like a postage stamp from the air. Visualize those five rows of tangled barbed wire as the perforated edges of the stamp; and inside that the evenly spaced bunkers as the stamp’s border; and moving toward the center, the line-troop hootches with their wooden frames and screened upper halves and tented roofs as a second khaki-colored inner border; and then the body of the stamp itself, a geometric abstract with battalion headquarters to the southeast, and the mile-long air strip running perpendicularly off-center, and to the southwest the rear echelon hootches, a base within a base with its own mess hall and motor pool, its own orderly room and EM’s Club, its own showers and latrines and chapel — for those Remfs who had anything to pray about.

My own hootch was just inside the perimeter to the northwest, and it had a metal roof, which meant that it was very popular after dark, when all us guys would climb up onto it to watch the Night Show — the pyrotechnic display of the Hueys tiring tracer rounds, or of the mortars (ours and the V.C.’s) chewing up the countryside. Fresh back from the boonies, there was comfort in watching the action from a safe distance; it beat
Batman
all to hell. Some of the rear echelon hootches at Cu Chi were as sumptuously equipped as the Waldorf-Astoria, with electric fans, refrigerators, hot plates, lawn chairs, foot lockers (made by the gooks out of discarded tin cans, and sold at the PX) and even television sets. We were out in the boonies more than we were back at the base, however, and our hardback was only sparsely furnished. The only advantage this gave us over the Remfs was that our empty Spartan cells seemed infinitely larger than their crowded
Playboy
pads, even though they all measured about the same — thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide. There were eight guys in my hootch, including Lloyd Parsons and myself.

Muhammed Ali, a man I enormously admired because he had announced to the world at large, “I don’t have no quarrel with them Vietcongs,” and then had been informed by the Illinois Boxing Commission that his spring title bout with Ernie Terrell was thereby canceled, later learning as well that he was persona non grata in such patriotic centers as Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Bangor, Maine, those guardian cities of America undoubtedly believing that a man who laid it on the line before millions of people each and every time he stepped into a ring was merely a downright yellow-bellied lily-livered coward for protesting his 1-A draft classification; Muhammed Ali, whom the press insisted on calling Cassius Clay despite his repeatedly slated preference for the Muslim name he had adopted; Muhammed Ali might have been surprised and pleased by the comfort in which we lived, exalted besides by the racial breakdown in our hootch, there being five white men and three Negroes present and accounted for, though I doubt he would have appreciated the democracy we experienced out in the boonies, where each of us, black or white, had a fair and equal opportunity of getting killed by them Vietcongs with whom, like Muhammed, many of us had no quarrel.

There were about twenty Chinooks and forty or fifty Hueys at Cu Chi and sometimes they coppered us to places that seemed a thousand miles away. The Air Force personnel at camp was limited to a dozen or so meteorologists, and so the fliers were Army pilots who would drop us in the middle of a clearing surrounded by jungle or rice paddy, and then go back to lay a short timer or two on a moldy mattress in a makeshift shack. Usually, though, we fanned out from the base in a radius no longer than twenty-five miles, going out on day-long patrols or ambushes, reconnaissance-in-force missions, and village sweeps that lasted for weeks and sometimes months, and then coming back to base for a day, or two, or four, and going out again. It was a very comical war, with no real front and with no place in Vietnam being positively secure against enemy action at any given time. Of the 190 guys in my company, I guess sixty per cent were smoking grass. In the hootch, the only one of us who wasn’t on pot was Lloyd Parsons, and maybe he had good and sufficient cause to avoid the stuff.

Lloyd was from 117th Street near Lenox Avenue, which he described as “New York’s fashionable Upper West Side, man.” He had begun smoking marijuana back in 1958, when it was still called Mary Jane, and before it was considered hip to bust a joint before dinner. He was twelve years old at the time, and a junior member in a bopping street gang called The Crusaders, which mounted regular armed forays into Spanish Harlem, a block and a half from its own turf. By 1959, The Crusaders ceased to function as an effective fighting unit, not because the Puerto Ricans had greatly depleted their forces, but merely because — of the gang’s fifteen charter members, and twelve members later recruited, and six junior members-in-training — only four of The Crusaders had not graduated from blowing tea to shooting heroin. (The Puerto Rican gangs were beginning to suffer from the effects of a similar escalation along about then, and so peace of a sort was achieved between the warring factors without benefit of intensive social work; nobody had time to go around breaking heads when he was trying to figure out where to get his next fix.) The gang broke up shortly thereafter, but not before Lloyd — at the age of fourteen — had become a confirmed junkie. He was busted for possession in the spring of 1962, while he was still a high school sophomore barely attending classes, and elected to be sent to Lexington for a commitment of at least four and a half months. He could not wait to get out of the hospital, and when he finally returned to his street in November, he immediately sought out his friendly neighborhood pusher and was back on the shit again within seventy-two hours. He stayed lucky until the beginning of 1964, when he was again picked up by the zealous detectives of the 28th Squad, and again sent to Kentucky. This time, because Lloyd had apparently learned something about himself in the intervening years, the cure was effective. He came back North in January of 1965, eighteen years old and determined never to go near narcotics again. His determination was strengthened by a little thing the United States had going over here in Southeast Asia. It seemed, Lloyd learned, that he could join the Army and enjoy an equality he had never known on the streets of Manhattan, while simultaneously being whisked away from daily contact with bad company eager to encourage and supply any new habit he might care to develop. He enlisted in February 1965, and made E-4 inside of a year. When I met him in Vietnam, he seemed very much his own man, confident that he would survive this war the way he had survived the war against the Puerto Ricans, certain there was a real future for him in the United States Army, where a man’s value was determined by the rating on his sleeve and not by the color of his skin. If anyone ever offered him a joint, Lloyd only shook his head politely, and said, “Thank you, no, I don’t smoke.” He was the coolest cat I’d ever met in my life. I think he considered me a friend.

In August, Dom Viscusi, a guy in our hootch, stepped on one of the V.C.’s punji sticks while we were on a vill sweep, the excrement-dipped, sharply-pointed bamboo piercing the sole of his boot and causing an infection that got him sent first to the 12th Evac Hospital on the base, and then to Japan for R and R, lucky bastard.

Rudy Webb was Dom’s replacement.

He arrived in September with about six or seven other guys who must have thought (the way I did when I first got there) that Cu Chi was
really
the boonies. I suppose it was, in relation to Saigon. But to us who had been there for a while, it was home, it was safe, and the boonies were out farther, the boonies were wherever they took us to fight. Rudy was an E-2, a short squat fellow with a weight lifter’s powerful build, crew-cut blond hair, and blue eyes slightly darker than my own. He came into the hootch somewhat shyly, the way most replacements did, and introduced himself to the other guys who were sitting around writing letters or listening to Armed Forces Radio on their transistors. He’d been flown over only last Tuesday, so we asked him the usual questions about the States and about the Saigon scene, and he answered us like fuzz being interviewed on a television news program, never once saying anything as simple as “We caught the crook” when it was possible to say, “We apprehended the perpetrator,” peppering his speech with words he surely understood, but making them sound like a second language. I guess he was trying very hard to create a good first impression among guys who had been living together for quite some time. But not knowing our separate backgrounds, and not wanting to take any chances, he came on like what I suspect he thought a college professor sounded like, and the results were a little ludicrous. Nonetheless, he seemed to be a nice enough guy, and I think all of us considered him a welcome addition to the hootch. Dom Viscusi had, in fact, been a terrible pain in the ass.

I did not get a chance to really talk to Rudy until evening chow, I was sitting alone at one of the mess hall tables when he came over and quietly asked, “Excuse me, is this seat occupied?”

“No,” I said.

“You mind if I join you?”

“Not at all.”

“Thank you,” he said, and climbed over the bench. He was wearing his newly issued cotton jungle shirt and field pants, and he moved with the ponderous neatness of most very strong men, moving his muscles about like
heavy
furniture in a small room, adjusting his buttocks to the bench and his arms to the table. He ate as though he had come from a large family where it was imperative to finish everything in sight before somebody grabbed it off your plate. He did not look up at me again until he had devoured all the food on his tray, and then he raised his head and his eyes and abruptly said, “I’m not sure I caught your name this afternoon. I’m Rudy Webb.”

“Wat Tyler,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you, Wat,” he said, grinning boyishly and engagingly, and then suddenly looked at me with a puzzled expression, and asked, “How was that again? Wat?”

“That’s right. Well, Walter, really.”

“Oh,
Walter

“But everyone calls me Wat.”

“Yeah?” he said, and shrugged. “Well,” he said, “regardless,” and extended his hand across the table, slyly watching me to see if I’d caught his proper usage, no dolt mouthing nonexistent words was he, “it’s a real pleasure,” and took my hand in a firm grip, a good grip, not the kind some jocks gave you when they were trying to assert something by crushing your fingers to a pulp. “Where are you from, Wat?” he said, like a genial master of ceremonies on a television game show, trying to put a nervous guest at ease.

“Connecticut.”

“That’s very nice up there in Connecticut,” he said. “Whereabouts exactly?”

“Talmadge.”

“I don’t believe I know it. That anywhere near New Haven?”

“About halfway between New Haven and New York.”

“I’m from Newark,” he said. “New Jersey.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But I got people in New Haven. Relatives.”

“I went to school there,” I said.

“Yeah? What school?”

“Yale.”

“Oh, yeah? The college there?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened? You flunk out?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“I quit.”

“How come?”

“Just like that,” I said, and shrugged.

“Didn’t you like it?”

“I liked it fine.”

“Then why’d you quit?”

“It was a personal matter.”

“You knock up a girl or something?”

“No,” I said, and suddenly burst out laughing.

“If you did, who cares? This is Vietnam, we’re lucky we get out of here without having our asses cracked,” he said and, pleased by my spontaneous laughter, began laughing with me.

The red silk pajamas came as a surprise that night to everyone in the hootch. But it was Jimmy Wyatt, a black kid from Philadelphia, who started giggling when he saw them. Depending on what season it was, we slept either in our underwear or all our clothes, not because civilian pajamas were outlawed (they weren’t), and not because we were worried about additional laundry charges (most of us sent our laundry out to be done, the way American sailors on Chinese gunboats did in the early 1900s, preferring the native work to the slob jobs done by the PX or QM concessions), and not because we thought it might be necessary to pull on our pants in a hurry (we were all fairly confident that Charlie would never get through the perimeter), but merely because you didn’t wear pajamas in the goddamn Army. I had never seen a soldier wearing pajamas, not at Fort Gordon where I’d taken my Basic, and not at Fort Jackson where I’d had my AIT, and certainly not here in Vietnam. But Rudy Webb readied into his duffle that first night, and pulled out a pair of blazing red silk pajamas we later learned he had bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a big yellow dragon embroidered on the back, and without a sign of embarrassment or a word of introduction, put them on and then picked up his toilet kit and started heading out of the hootch toward the latrine. Jimmy Wyatt, who was tall and skinny and who had played center for his high school’s basketball team, was stretched out on his cot reading a comic. It got very cold at night in September, even when it wasn’t raining, and so Jimmy was fully dressed except for his boots, and he had wrapped his legs in a blanket besides, and he seemed very cozy and happy and thoroughly engrossed in his reading. His short-timer’s calendar hung on the wall behind him, the gatefold from last month’s
Playboy,
over which he had drawn a grid of tiny squares covering the girl’s body and representing the number of days to the end of his tour. Each time we got back from the boonies, Jimmy filled in more of the squares with his pencil. He had forty-two days to go, and the only open squares were on the girl’s huge breasts and belly. He turned a page in the comic as Rudy walked past, and I suppose the dazzling display of red silk caught his eye because he looked up and suddenly began giggling. Rudy stopped dead in his tracks, as though he had been anticipating some comment on his sleeping attire, and was now more than ready to deal with it. There was a smile on his face as he turned to Jimmy. I was writing a letter to Dana at the other end of the hootch, and when I looked up the first thing I saw was Rudy’s smile, and I remember thinking what an odd smile it was, and then he said, “What’s the matter, pal?”